St. Louis biotech startup PercayAI and Saint Louis University (SLU) have announced a partnership to provide SLU researchers with access to PercayAI’s augmented intelligence (AI) drug discovery platform.

Using a unique combination of contextual language processing, novel heuristics, and machine learning, the software finds non-obvious contextual signals to help scientists rapidly understand the complete biological process relevant to their research – in days rather than months. Through the collaboration, PercayAI computational biologists and machine learning engineers will work closely with SLU faculty and students to train them on the use of PercayAI’s AI platform and help them apply it to their current research projects.

“The early results from our collaboration with PercayAI are very encouraging,” said Fran Sverdrup, Ph.D., associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at SLU. “With the help of their AI platform, we were able to uncover new relationships in our data sets that led to new potential drug targets. We are excited to follow-up on these new leads and expand the use of their technology to help advance our drug discovery efforts in the rare disease space.”

One of the primary components of the PercayAI platform is CompBio, software co-developed with the Genome Technology Access Center at the McDonnell Genome Institute (GTAC@MGI) at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

“With this software, researchers can organize and prioritize relevant data in ways that aren’t possible with traditional methods, improving the speed, cost and success rate of drug research and development,” said Preston Keller, Chief Commercial Officer at PercayAI. “We’re excited to establish a close partnership with Saint Louis University and work with them to support and expand the biological research community in Saint Louis.”